By
Joyce Peterson

Announcing a total of seven grants to Maine-based researchers during MCF’s July 19 gala fundraising event, Executive Director Tara Hill said, “We could not be more pleased to support this work. The grant funding we award tonight will go toward studying breast cancer, lung cancer, kidney cancer, leukemia and brain cancer.”

The recipients included Julie Wells, Ph.D., a JAX research scientist, who will receive $50,000 to study how lung cancer spreads and forms tumors in other sites in the body, and JAX postdoctoral associate Archana Gopalan, Ph.D., granted $50,000 to study how brain cancer tumors contain many types of cells and how this impacts the success of treatment.

Two other awards went to JAX researchers studying different aspects of leukemia: Assistant Professor Jennifer Trowbridge, Ph.D., whose $50,000 grant will support her studies of how leukemia progresses from a benign form to a lethal form, and Professor Leonard Shultz, who will receive $168,834 to develop a genetically modified mouse that can be used to understand the cellular and molecular changes in leukemia.

To date MCF has awarded more than $1.8 million in research grants to JAX. On July 18, JAX recognized MCF with the JAX Champion Award in recognition of its role as research partner and advocate.

The other 2014 MCF recipients were Drs. Andre Khalil and Michael Mason from the University of Maine Orono, and Dr. Leif Oxburgh from Maine Medical Center Research Institute.

The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution and National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, Calif., and a new genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Conn. It employs a total staff of more than 1,600. Its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health.